June 2015 Reading!

Oo la la! Want to discover a new you this sultry summer season? The ladies of Poison Pen will be giving out tips on how to be your best and baddest self this month as they show you how to take down all your haterz with prose and poetry that won’t knock a single hair out of place. Cheersies!

LAUREN BERRY SHELLBERG received a BA in creative writing from Florida State University and an MFA from the University of Houston, where she won the Inprint Verlaine Prize and served as poetry editor for Gulf Coast. From 2009 to 2010, she held the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute. Her first collection of poems, The Lifting Dress, was selected by Terrance Hayes to win the National Poetry Series and was released by Penguin in 2011.

NISHTA J. MEHRA is the daughter of Indian immigrants and a native of Memphis, Tennessee. Eighth-grade English teacher by day, Mehra authors the blog Blue Jean Gourmet and published her first book, The Pomegranate King, in 2013. She lives with her partner, Jill Carroll, and their 18-month-old son, Shiv, in a suburb of Houston.

ADRIENNE PERRY earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College, serves as the current editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, and is a Kimbilio Fellow at the University of Houston. Adrienne is currently at work on a novel and a collection of short stories. An excerpt of her story “Red Desert” was translated by Jean Guiloineau and appears in the French literary journal Siècle 21. An excerpt of her forthcoming novel is forthcoming from Tidal Basin Review.